Scott Detrow

Scott Detrow is a political correspondent for NPR. He covers the 2020 presidential campaign and co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast.

Detrow joined NPR in 2015. He reported on the 2016 presidential election, then worked for two years as a congressional correspondent before shifting his focus back to the campaign trail.

Before that, he worked as a statehouse reporter in both Pennsylvania and California, for member stations WITF and KQED. He also covered energy policy for NPR's StateImpact project, where his reports on Pennsylvania's hydraulic fracturing boom won a DuPont-Columbia Silver Baton and national Edward R. Murrow Award in 2013.

Detrow got his start in public radio at Fordham University's WFUV. He graduated from Fordham, and also has a master's degree from the University of Pennsylvania's Fels Institute of Government.

One of the more jarring moments of parenthood came when I did a simple math problem. My son was born 17 years after the Sept. 11 attacks. So what, I wondered, would the historical parallel be for me compared with him?

That is to say, what major news story had happened 17 years before I was born, and how immediate or distant did it feel to me?

Security concerns have prompted the Democratic National Committee to recommend nixing a plan that would have allowed Iowans and Nevadans to remotely caucus for candidates next year.

Supporters have long argued that "virtual caucuses" would open up Iowa's first-in-the-nation presidential contest, which requires caucusers to physically attend sometimes hours-long events to declare their choice for president.

Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are campaigning on "big structural change" and "political revolution." Former Vice President Joe Biden thinks voters will weigh the "soul of America" as they decide whom to support.

Sen. Kamala Harris is making a different bet.

The California senator's campaign is increasingly focused on economic challenges that, as she framed it at the Iowa State Fair this weekend, wake voters up in the middle of the night.

Before the first presidential debate last month, former Vice President Joe Biden's campaign signaled that he expected to be attacked by the candidates trailing him in the polls but that Biden would essentially ignore all incoming fire.

It was a classic front-runner approach. And it was punctured, hard and fast, by California Sen. Kamala Harris' attack on Biden's past opposition to federal busing policies.

President Trump has made undoing the Obama Administration's foreign policy record one of his top priorities. So it's no surprise that former Vice President Joe Biden — who played a key role in implementing now-abandoned agreements like the Paris climate agreement and the Iran nuclear deal, sees Trump's foreign policy as a disaster.

When I think of Bud Selig, I always think about one particular moment.

It's the 11th inning of the 2002 All-Star Game. The event was held in Selig's hometown Milwaukee, in the beautiful new ballpark he and his family spent a decade fighting to get built. But instead of reveling in what should have been one of the greatest moments of his life, the Major League Baseball commissioner was frustrated, angry and holding his hands out in an exasperated shrug.

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren spent most of the spring as the Democratic presidential hopeful on the rise.

Her poll numbers steadily ticked up, as she carved out a spot as a policy-focused candidate whose weekly plan rollouts set much of the broader campaign agenda.

The momentum translated to fundraising. Warren took in $19.1 million in April, May and June — more than three times what her campaign raised during the first quarter of 2019, according to her campaign Monday.

One of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders's most animated moments in Thursday night's Democratic debate came after California Rep. Eric Swalwell urged voters to "pass the torch" to a new generation of leaders.

Swalwell's critique was aimed at former Vice President Joe Biden. But despite the fact that Sanders has been increasingly critical of Biden's policy positions, the independent Senator tried to rush to his fellow septuagenarian's defense. "As part of Joe's generation, let me respond," he urged the moderators in the middle of a candidate free-for-all.

The day after former Vice President Joe Biden recalled his "civil" and productive working relationships decades ago with two longtime segregationist and racist fellow lawmakers, fellow Democrats are pouncing.

At a New York City fundraiser Tuesday night, Biden told donors he has reached across the aisle throughout his career. "I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland," Biden said, according to a pool report. "He never called me 'boy'; he always called me 'son.' "

"Nations, to make sense of themselves, need some kind of agreed-upon past," Jill Lepore writes in her latest book, This America: The Case for the Nation. "They can get it from scholars or they can get it from demagogues."

The past few presidential campaigns, environmental activists have "been left begging for there to be a single question at a campaign debate about climate change," longtime climate change activist and author Bill McKibben recently told NPR.

Eight Democratic presidential candidates faced the same basic question today in Houston: Why should women of color vote for them?

The first-ever She The People Presidential Forum — organized by and centered on questions from women of color — served as a repeated reminder of the key role that minority women play in Democratic politics.